Cinema: Steel Butterfly

Toys in the Attic. Playwright Lillian Hellman is like a small, scared Racine. Her lines flip into the mind like well-aimed darts. Her scenes stack like well-designed dishes. Unhappily, there is seldom much nourishment in them. Hellman speaks her mind brilliantly but opens her heart rarely. When the moment requires feeling, she too often offers irony; when the theme invites tragedy, she resorts to melodrama; when the problem demands experiment, she is careful to be commercial. She is exciting but not moving. She writes superbly about sex but badly about love. She creates grand characters but not real people. She has words, sometimes wonderful words. They always say something intensely intelligent; they seldom say anything that fundamentally matters.

In this picture, adapted from the drama that in 1960 was selected as Broadway’s best, Playwright Hellman returns to the Southern scene of her greatest triumph (The Little Foxes) and to the theme that has attached her deepest energies: the fateful antinomy of power and love. Her leading lady (Geraldine Page) is a gabby genteel old maid, one of those wispy little women who flutter through the literature of the South like a flock of steel butterflies. She lives in a rotting ancestral manse, she graciously permits her spinster sister (Wendy Hiller) to wait on her hand and foot, she justifies her gistless existence by smother-mothering her younger brother (Dean Martin). The brother is a frivolous failure and she likes him that way. He makes her feel necessary, he makes her feel important; and in pursuing his problems she escapes her own.

Silly woman. She depends on the dependence of an undependable dependent. One day the rat comes home rich, and her world collapses. He no longer needs her consolation, he no longer needs her cash. He is free, a man. She has nothing but herself, an emptiness that only he can fill. He tries to. He buys her expensive dresses; she refuses to accept them. He clears away the mortgage; she says she hates the house. He hands her a ticket to Europe; she swears she will not go. What does she want? Her sister thinks she knows: “You want to sleep with him. You always have.” But the audience knows better: she really wants to devour him. And at the climax she does.

The play is written with Hellman’s customary vigor and elegance, and James Poe’s script incorporates almost all of it intact. What’s more, Geraldine Page slithers through her role with the sinister sweetness of a chocolate-covered cobra, and Dean Martin demonstrates impressively that he can act. But something is terribly wrong with this picture. It is cold, mechanical, dead. The central situation is contrived, and the characters are about as sincerely Southern as a bouquet of nylon magnolia blossoms. Playwright Hellman left New Orleans when she was still a child, and time has strewn cobwebs on the toys in her attic.